The Best American Poetry

“As Above So Below”: Mark Leckey Does a Good Job [By Tracy Danison]

“As Above So Below”, installation by Mark Leckey, Lafayette Anticipations. Photo © Aurélien Mole, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris

These days, as, each morning, a body must crouch up and frog run from the Huey Combat Utility Copter of Personal Belief into the unending Battle of The Whips and Scorns, they need metaphysical reassurance. Not an ethical dewicate wittle kissie-wissie, but, as it were, a hearty thumbs-up from a beefy philosophical Sarge or Sarge-equivalent. Mark Leckey, whose installation As Above So Below is at Lafayette Anticipations, Paris, until 20 July, is, in at least one way, that Sarge.

Leckey is an artist who knows reality and transcendence of reality are rooted in more obscure mechanisms and broader cultural beliefs as well as personal experience. So, his work may very well provide an anxious body with that hearty thumbs up. If not, a body will provide themself with a couple or three wry smiles.

 

“As Above So Below”, installation by Mark Leckey, Lafayette Anticipations. Photo © Aurélien Mole, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris

Since the late 1990s, Leckey has been exploring culture, technology, music and memory. As he sees it, the current obscure mechanisms and beliefs from above have been here-below since the Renaissance. So, for As Above So Below, thematically, Leckey seamlessly integrates the tradition of the ecstatic vision into the 21st century quotidians of psychic displacements and dissociations, unexpected plague, future shock and louring technology. Artistically, Leckey links the technology, esthetics and media of marketing and advertising with, especially, broadly Renaissance and Baroque religious symbolism.

A large gargoyle-like statue of Job – an All-powerful God’s faithful servant and a vigorous Satan’s whiny plaything – is both at the topographical center of and media command post for the installation and source for an audio feed of mutter and lament. Job’s skin is explosively torn with fist-size and larger holes up and down and back to front of his body. Seemingly from the inside.

 

“As Above So Below”, installation by Mark Leckey, Lafayette Anticipations. Photo © Aurélien Mole, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris

At first, I thought the wounds were versions of corrupt flesh, recalling popped buboes or boils and thought Job might be an ultra-vi or video-game version of Saint Roche, the Baroque plague saint. Radiated out from Job, what amount to “chapels”, or, considering the Job-ean lament in the air, maybe teched-up “stations of the cross”. These use graphic styles from gaming and public-messaging iconography to touch on themes such as fear or the ambiguity of reality. They contain what amount to “relics” (contemplative or holy-looking objects) that are evoked through thematic legends, video-painting, other multimedia or just or objects whose style or intent suggests a different era.

The highly contemporary mediums of the relics integrate such period- or use- symbolic materials-techniques as gold leaf or such period-themed objects as a labyrinth-map or iconography such as a recurring stylized shining sun stamp (as on Baroque-style illuminated maps).

 

“As Above So Below”, installation by Mark Leckey, Lafayette Anticipations. Photo © Aurélien Mole, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris

Though there is of course an implicit narrative in joining together old and new, Leckey’s approach is to let an on-looker’s visual, sound and tactile experience of the installation work out the sense they want to give to it. They are never pressed to understand anything. They can just have fun if that’s all they wanna do. The non-directivity is also true in terms of the approach to technology and technique: transistors, chips, VDTs, brushes, paint and canvas are used as equal tools in putting a piece together. In the end, in this very technology-intensive installation, there is very little or no accent on technology.

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Elsa Coustou is curator for Mark Leckey’s “As Above So Below” multimedia installation, which I saw at Lafayette Anticipations, Paris, on 31 March 2025. “As Above So Below” runs until 20 July 2025.

Quantum Entanglement Revealed! Jeanne Alechinsky’s “Ghosts” is on to something [By Tracy Danison]

“Ghosts” cast: Jeanne Alechinsky, background, with musician collaborators Jacques Salamaka and Julie Appéré. Photo © Isabelle Chemin, Paramour Compagnie, 2025

My next-to-eldest brother, Joe, now deceased, said of our childhood house that a body so inclined could always find a signed first edition of Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature, a 5-ton differential axle or a worn yellow rubber bath duck. Indeed, my parents essentially roped off an area of the house where we kids were free to do pretty much as we pleased. And we pleased to do a rural slum with junkyard and life library, to make an unnatural condominium of magpie and pig, faun and wolf.

My brother, Peter, the oldest of a couple three natural musicians among us, would sometimes spend hours plonked in the middle of our junkyard slum, deaf, mute, systematically contemplating the different declensions of vibration flowing out from his guitar with wahwah, new in those days. Sometimes, the vibe would make us all slow to a stop while the air thickened and shimmered, things and people took on a vibrato glow.

I bring this up because it’s the remembrance Jeanne Alechinsky’s Ghosts work-in-progress inspired in me.

Ghosts, Alechinsky writes, themes around the visible us with the “invisible” – the shimmer and glow to the world that Peter naively conjured with his guitar, I think.  She conjures quite deliberately by putting musicians Jacques Salamaka, with a drum set, and Julie Appéré, with bass guitar, on stage, at the limit of performance space. Alechinsky herself is at the center, wears regular-fit silver pants, a white top, shares her space with a chair with a white dust cover slightly behind, to the right. This is what I saw when the lights come on.

 

“Ghosts” logo by Jeanne Alechinsky. Photo © Jeanne Alechinsky, Paramour Compagnie

I can’t recall whether action begins when I realize that Alechinsky has either assumed or innovated the gestural tropes of talking to the invisible and somebody talking to their cell phone or when Julie Appéré makes everything and everybody shiver with a loud long, rich note or subtle chord thrump on her bass.

Not too terribly long ago, before smartphones and Bluetooth, talking to the air meant “crazy person”. Now talking in the air has evolved to signify either talking with another person or with your ghost. We’ve mostly learned to tell the difference. Alechinsky has noticed this and used it. It’s important. Here’s a proof of meaningful evolution of a visual figure and also that the transformation is choreographed into a “lexicon” or, better, a “vidicon” of dance: an entry for Mathieu Bouvier’s Atlas.

But it’s not just that with choreography and dance Alechinsky conjures the shimmer and glow of vibrato we sometimes hear and see in the subjects and objects around us.

Her dance performance gets across the nature of the “ghosts” and the “invisible”, that, based on my own long-ago first experience of it, I think she’s talking about. Spectators, as I was, are drawn into and stimulated by the sound and presence of the musicians. But Alechinsky is always strangely parallel and there amidst. Her movement does not flow with the swells of the bass and her pace is not rhythmed by the beat of the drum. She does that I guess because ghosts (and the invisible) are individual and states, insides and outsides, bordered and not, felt and not. Her figures have to point in all directions at once but at somewhere rather than nowhere. And by seeming to do all that, she does. So, visually, while Alechinsky seems physically is pierced to the root, seems to run into walls and move mountains, to hear and chase voices, to see and be seen by the unseen, she projects the sensibility of, and the spectator experiences instead of sympathetic physical feeling, awareness – the sense of slowing to a brief stop within the shimmer and glow of reality.

As I was hurrying out – it was the middle of the working day, after all –  I was thinking that my headline for Alechinsky’s Ghosts might be, à la click bait…

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I saw “Ghosts”, a work-in-progress dance performance by Jeanne Alechinsky and musicians Jacques Salamaka, playing drums, and Julie Appéré, bass guitar, on 27 March 2025 as part of the Open Space program at Théâtre Etoile du Nord. “Ghosts” in expected to premiere at Etoile du Nord in September 2025.

Other works in progress on 27 March included Prouesses de l’Echec N°17 (“Adventures in failure N#17”) by Collectif Format A3, from a concept by Sylvain Ollivier and written and performed in collaboration with David Lelièvre and Julie Mouton and “De Diaboli” by Christine Armanger and performed by her and Clémentine Vanlerberghe.

“Prouesses” features a hilarious take on Dunning and Kruger syndrome, which posits, rather ominously for humanity, I think, that while incompetents overestimate their level of ability and are perfectly unaware of this, they discount demonstrated competence in others.  Armanger’s piece uses a devil-invoked robot (drone) dog to explore the shaping effects of technology on human outcomes. De Diaboli is programmed for the Faits d’Hiver 2026 dance festival.

Tom Cassani’s really big trick: Iterations of the small [By Tracy Danison]

“Iterations” by writer, performer and magician Tom Cassani. Photo © Camille Blake Forecast, Skills e.V.

The other day I was trying to focus on Marion Zurbach’s excellent Les Héritiers-x (“The Inheritors-x”) and one of the many of  the thoughts bedeviling me was that in a reality where everything is supposed to be a story or a part of a story, small plot twists take on an outsize role in determining what this or that lived narrative “is really about”.

There’s of course the American Ur-scold-proverb, “The Kingdom was lost for want of a nail”, designed, efficiently, to both scare light-heartedness out of and promote obsessive compulsion in boys and girls. And though experience has taught adults that “history”, and kingdoms, too, come down to clashes of competing turpitudes and cupidities, there has now got to be a zillion quintillion competing “turning points”, such stuff as key assassinations or decisive battles or crucial votes in Congress or, for God’s sake, some random line in the “Bible”. And all that.

Truth of experience, though, remains truth of experience. Small things don’t determine big things. Mostly, just the opposite. Big things like quantum entanglement, culture, or the aggregate of personal learnings, determine the small things, like turpitudes, cupidities, kingdoms, nails, assassinations, battles and votes in Congress. Then, one AMAZING story or another is shaped out of one or more of these small things. The big things are ignored.

Mark my words, our civilization is now firmly set to croak on click-bait.

With an hour’s worth of amusing patter and theatrical variations on the ordinary disappearing coin trick, Zen magician Tom Cassani managed to pass this clear insight into the iterations (and reiterations) of the small in a big, big world and also keep me delighted and hanging on the edge of my chair, too. Cassani has something of Mephistopheles under his 1984-style black overalls, something of a true Magus. So I guess that’s why. I’ll certainly be on the lookout for his next show if not for the insight, then for the entertainment.

Tom Cassani’s shtick is this:

 

“Iterations”. Photo © Camille Blake Forecast, Skills e.V.

From what one might suppose to be a grimoire, he feigns following instructions for one or another way of presenting the old disappearing coin trick. The sleight of hand stays quite unrevealed, however. Instead, his idea is to focus spectator attention on the disappearance, finding ways to get spectators nearer and nearer to its locale. He even sets up a big video screen so we can all better scrutinize the disappearance and ignore the sleight of hand behind it. Interestingly, Cassani has only one other trick in this shtick: he “enlarges” the coin once, but only enough so that everybody sees that he can do another trick, I expect.

As the show goes along, I realize that the trick works every blessed time not because Cassani is such a clever fellow, but because, like every last person in the room, I am fixated on the disappearance because I’m telling myself that some little thing, a twitching finger, a hitch, a switch will reveal how the trick works. But it won’t. There isn’t really any trick in it at all: my perception doesn’t allow me to see it. All the magician has to do is keep the coin out of sight, as a body does with a treat for a dog and a very common political maneuver.

So Karine and I walked back to the trolley stop for the long ride home. I held that my conclusion is that magic is a science, an excursion to the odorless, tasteless, touchless, soundless and sightless holes that are half of the woof and weave of what biological seeing affords and largely ignored when examining our grasp on the world. Those stories we tell ourselves, I told her, are more like the flashes of silver we might see as a salmon labors upstream than a silvery salmon laboring upstream. Karine, who tends toward the Bishop Berkeley in things, could, nevertheless, find no real stones to kick so I won’t burden the reader.

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I saw “Iterations”, written and performed by writer, performer and magician Tom Cassani, at Théâtre Silvia Monfort as part of the 23d Biennale de danse du Val-de-Marne (2025) dance performance program on 21 March 2023. “Iterations” was developed from Cassani’s ‘Expanded Magic’ research project with support from Forecast, Skills e.V. and Florentina Holzinger and in collaboration with Karen Christopher, CJ Mitchell, BOLD!, Augusto Corrieri, Tim Bromage, Hester Stephan Chillingworth and Nik Taylor

In Paris, celebrate diversity, inclusion and our shared planet with June Events 2025 [By Tracy Danison]

“Eléctro-Tap”, duo, creation, Candice Martel. Photo © Marc Plantec

Take heart. In 2025, in addition to the 500 new pedestrian streets and new tree plantings announced by her really excellent Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, the Atelier de Paris’ dance performance festival June Events 2025 will come, not to bury, but to celebrate, diversity, inclusion and respect for our shared planet. Due perhaps to a rough and rather too-lengthy entry into the Age of Aquarius, June Events starts this year on 2 and ends on 20 June 2025.

Both an opportunity to learn about and to support new and emerging artists and a reminder how liberal theory works concretely to supply a better world than the Hobbesian Scientism of Vladimir Putin Corp.’s faux traditionalism. So, whether you’re proudly woke, like me, or just love dance performance, like me, this year’s June Events is, on a couple of heads, a cream-jeans event and worth planning a Paris visit around.

 

“Vagabondages & Conversations”, duo, creation, Gilles Clément & Christian Ubl. Photo © j2mc

The 2025 festival keeps up its tradition of including international artists. Featured artists this year hail from Brazil, Québec, Tunisia, Switzerland, Belgium and Australia, as well as France, and include among them many past collaborators, invited to celebrate the 25-year anniversary of the founding of the Atelier de Paris at the Cartoucherieperforming arts complex in the Bois de Vincennes.

Many of the featured choreographers and performers – just off the cuff, Rebecca Journo, Nina Santes, Liz Santoro & Pierre Godard and Marie-Caroline Hominal – have figured over the years in my public essays or whose work has been, like Ikue Nakagawa with her mannekins, or Rémy Héritier and his work with space and place, in my good books. There is a wealth of performance forms on offer: creations and premières, solos, duos, trios, quartets… even a fifty-strong group, all embodying the broader themes of diversity, inclusion and our shared planet – I hope to write more about these concepts as they apply to dance performance before and during the festival.

 

“Monga”, solo, creation, Jessica Teixera. Photo © Ligia Jardim

Venues include new and historic developers of emerging movement art north of the Seine and east of Châtelet, including Carreau du Temple, Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles Paris, Ménagerie de Verre, Théâtre de la Bastille and, at the Cartoucherie, the Théâtre de l’Aquarium and, of course, the Atelier de Paris.

Since 1970, the Cartoucherie, a reconverted small-arms ammunition factory, has been home to Ariane Mnouchkine’s still very much politically-engaged, and collaboratively-organized, Théâtre du Soleil, as well as of three other quality, innovative theaters (Théâtre de l’Epée de Bois, Théâtre de la Tempête and Théâtre de l’Aquarium). And since American-born Carolyn Carlson brought in her contemporary dance troupe in1999, the place has been home to the founder and sponsor of June Events, Atelier de Paris/CDNC, one of 15 national centers for dance development.

 

“(M)other”, quintet, creation, Jeanne Brouaye. Photo © Elma-Plaza

It is not far-fetched to think that supporting dance performance culture and enjoying the offer and environment of June Events this year can be a quiet affirmation of the concrete achievements of the liberal, woke, order. Consider, the way we treat children today: “Ulysse” – Josette Baïz and the gifts of today’s un-classic ballet. Consider also that in addition to its missions of encouraging the culture of movement arts and bringing contemporary dance to the broadest audience, Atelier de Paris has a special commitment to hearing-impaired and sign language-using artists and publics.

Any way you look at it, June Events 2025 is worth a ticket.

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Artists and performances, June Events 2 - 20 June 2025

Candice Martel, “Électro-tap”, duo, creation 2025 ; Liz Santoro & Pierre Godard, “Mutual Information”, duo, creation 2021; Rebecca Journo, “Les amours de la pieuvre”, quatuor, creation 2024; Rosalind Crisp, “Performance” (provisional title), trio, creation 2025; Nina Santes, “Chansons mouillées”, solo, creation 2025; Marie-Caroline Hominal, “Numéro 0: scène III”, triskaideket (long dozen or 13), creation 2025; Dilo Paulo, “Ekesa Sando”, solo, creation 2024; Puma Camillê, “En rythme de résistance”, quatuor, creation 2025; Jessica Teixera, “Monga”, solo, creation 2024; Manuel Roque, “Le Vent se lève”, solo, creation 2024; Geisha Fontaine & Pierre Cottreau, “Mille et une danses”, for fifty non-professional performers, creation 2025, première; Joanne Leighton, “The Gathering”, decadet (ten), creation 2025; Louise Vanneste, “Mossy Eye Moor”, quintet, creation 2025; Rémy Héritier, “Un monde reel”, duo, creation 2025; Jeanne Brouaye, (M)other, quintet, creation 2025, première;  Ikue Nakagawa; “Kuroko”, solo, creation 2025; Mohamed Issaoui, “Ommi Sissi”, solo; creation 2024; Gilles Clément & Christian Ubl, “Vagabondages et Conversations”, duo, creation 2025

Mystery in familiarity: Marion Zurbach’s “Les Héritiers-x” happens [By Tracy Danison]

A couple of months ago, a neighbor over the street with whom Karine, my partner, has only ever had a nodding acquaintance, decided to move to Berlin, to be with her younger son. The neighbor, a 60-something mother also of two other grown children, a pretty fair hobby painter and who speaks only French remarks, “Why not? I’ve never been to Berlin”.

Emptying her apartment, the neighbor put at least the last 30 years of her many self-portraits, as well as portraits of friends and family, in the street for trash pickup. Coming back from a movie, Karine saw the portraits, and brought them all into her house. She has festooned the living room and mezzanine with them.

Now, I often find myself contemplating these portraits. There seems such mysterious familiarity in people! Whether they are familiar because over the years of being in the neighborhood I’ve actually seen or experienced these particular faces and their attitudes, or because the different seemings depicted in the portraits hold a mirror to my own seemings, or because there are only really such a small number of human types in the world that everybody and their portraits everywhere eventually become familiar, I just don’t know.   

All this come to mind because Marion Zurbach’s Les Héritiers-x (“The Inheritors-x”), which I saw the other day as part of the selection of the Festival Artdanthé 2025, deals in mysterious familiarities, too. Only not in human interactions, seemings or types, but the mysteriousness of human movement.

 

“Les Héritiers-x” by Marion Zurbach in collaboration with Évo Mine Lambillon and Pierre Piton. Photo © Arnaud Bouvier

Zurbach’s piece is based on Orchésographie, said to be the first known manual of dance and the first instance of choreographic notation, too. Orchésographie has a priest teaching a lawyer pretty much all the types of dance step current in the 16^th Century. The symbolic relationship of priest and lawyer is “Auctoritas docet legem”: God informs the laws that govern people. The different dance steps represent the different human characteristics. So, at the Renaissance, at least, dance is a general declaration on the mechanics of life: Authority informs the law which interprets it into the different choreographies that create the dance of life here-below.

Something like that.

Except under Marion Zurbach’s auctoritas and the fine interpretation herself and her collaborator-performers Évo Mine Lambillon and Pierre Piton, Orchésographie’s rather recondite premise becomes a lively improvisation of a continuous flow of dance – a happening – that seems to have more to do with the relation of movement to environment to light to space to sound to symbolism and what we believe and suppose.

Here’s how i Les Héritiers-x rolled out for me, which, since happening comes on and carries a body along so early on, is not necessarily how it rolled out for anybody else, choreographer included. It seems to me that discrete things happen through little cues: add a bit of sound or attitude or both or a prop, or a light, or a gesture or, since Zurbach doesn’t use her inputs to imperialize, there’s room for the spectator to share the piece’s sensibilities.

 

“Les Héritiers-x” by Marion Zurbach in collaboration with Évo Mine Lambillon and Pierre Piton. Photo © Arnaud Bouvier

At the back of the stage, by a woman in the front row calling moves and marking time, two performers, both imaginatively, but not outlandishly, dressed in gaudy corselets and short pants, are brought forward. They move by numbers, OK – But numbers of what nature? Are they really under instruction from that woman? Is the simpering and flustering part of it? Is this a game or a reconstitution or some sort of effort to get at an essence by a performing ménage à trois?  – with – what I suppose are proper facial attitudes – handholding and steps – I believe – are prescribed – by the manual Orchésographie. And then after what comes before, there’s jigs and part-singing and all sorts of prancing that I can’t recall because I kept putting my pencil down to watch.

Don't get the idea that my stream of broken consciousness hints at confusion in the performance. Not at all. It just un-stuck or de-stuck me in time: it’s hard to express a rational break up of narrative linearity into a happening or a form of the process of perception. Les Héritiers-x rather declares that past and present are of a piece.

The long and short of it is that Les Héritiers-x is both a Marion Zurbach-inspired early 21^st century love and dance show and an honest reconstitution of a (pretty-much imagined) Renaissance when Auctoritas et Legem freely cooed and simpered. Zurbach, with Évo Mine Lambillon and Pierre Piton, create a happening that both carries me and enables me to carry forward and backward, around and through, the “inheritance” of Orchésographie.

Les Héritiers-x is satisfyingly dizzying dance, capital D.

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I saw “Les Héritiers-x” by Marion Zurbach performed by and in collaboration with Évo Mine Lambillon and Pierre Piton as part of Festival Arthdanthé at Théâtre de Vanves on 7 March 2025, with sound composition by Stélios Lazarou, dance coaching, singing and musical arrangement by Madeleine Saur, writing assistance by Arthur Eskenazi and costumes by Silvia Romanelli.  

The Great Chevalier Tour: trough of inspiration for USA folklore ballet? [By Tracy Danison]

"The Great Chevalier Tour", reaching for the sky for Luxemburg, Le Grand Chevalier. Photo © Arnaud Bouvier

As part of the premier of The Great Chevalier Tour, M. Chevalier chose the Vanves, France, City Hall salle du marriage for his historic homage to Ballet National Folklorique du Luxembourg the iconic Danse du Pigeon, the trembling heart of the legendary ballet’s founders’, sisters Joséphine and Claudine Bal’s, signature ballet, Josiane la Paysanne (“Josiane the female Peasant”).

The Danse du Pigeon sequence of Josiane is today recognized as the paradigm of Western folklore ballet, was developed and premiered 50 years ago to the very day and under the very same gaze of the very monumental bust of Marianne mounted on today’s back wall.

 

Detail of panel, “Owl with Minerva”, Vanves City Hall, salle du mariage”. Note the clouds. Photo © Tracy Danison

The Bal sisters are said to have been inspired to the Danse du Pigeon choreographic riff by the symbolic owl in the emblematic Minerva figuring on the marriage salle’s central ceiling vault, painted there by the same 19th century artist who did the original cityscapes still decorating the walls, most of which are recognizable today, the city’s mayor said during his opening allocution. The sisters Bal, while native Luxemburgers to the core, worked in nearby Brussels, Belgium. The Vanves mayor, a strikingly attractive man, said his southwest Paris suburb had welcomed the celebrated sisters when devastating floods had temporarily destroyed their more northerly dance atelier, raising some sympathy among the evening’s spectators.  

Dancer (and remarkable prancer) M. Chevalier, dit “Le Grand Chevalier”, also co-director of the National Ballet Folklorique, performed Danse du pigeon upon the parquet between the salle’s antique oak Magistrate’s Bench and a rapt audience.

Le Grand Chevalier’s aplomb, in addition to the elegant en tête bobbling, sidewise en pointe stepping and abruptefancy flights that characterize the celebrated fortress nation’s most renowned dance, included a dramatic evocation of the history and national plomb of the celebrated dukedom.

 

Position #3.5 from celebrated “Wings high” sequence, Le Grand Chevalier, “Danse du Pigeon”. Photo © Arnaud Bouvier

The multi-talented co-director was able, through states of undress, including modestly bare shoulders and breasts, a family-style codpiece, multiple revisions of the Iconic dance’s bobbles, pointes, grand jetés, along with enthusiastic audience participation in the symbolic gestures of skyward national ambition, to well characterize the Luxemburg spirit: “Growing like grass, blooming as buds”, as he might well put it.

In the air of the salle, as that truly throbbing Le Grand Chevalier made his final emotional, deeply personal salute, wrapping himself in a magnificent rug of many horses and thus pointing the many grand Chevaliers or Ritters or Horse Soldiers that have pockmarked the little fortress nation’s history, was a growing feeling, in warmer patriotic hearts, that the USA too must have their own Danse du Pigeon written into their iconic ballet, Winning Karen Winning.

Unfortunately, USA pigeons, are now extinct by necessity as well as national right and nature’s red-toothed law. They became, as historians note, the delicious squab that enabled my ancestors to build the limitless farms, factories and penitentiaries that have so long welcomed the rest.

 

Under Marianne's gaze, Monsieur Le Maire de Vanves, Bernard Gauducheau, in presence of co-director Simone Mousset, pays homage to sisters Joséphine and Claudine Bal, founders of Ballet National Folklorique du Luxembourg. Photo © Arnaud Bouvier

Reminded that “squab”, “a nestling tumbling to the ground, fat and flabby, a richly slapping sound” reminds of those iconic offerings emblematic of true American contribution, that are, as Lord Byron has put it, “soft, yet cohesive, neither rashly swift nor insolently slow”:  The Turd.

Thus, as spectators filed pensively out of this salle of homage in Vanves, France, they thought, with love and pride, of course, of production values much bigger and better than diminutive Luxemburg could ever offer, for the USA: Dance of the Turd… With its own historic music, Central Park in the Dark by Charles Ives… A modernist composer, yes, but also, and in his actual lifetime, a bigly successful salesman and insurance entrepreneur. 

Simone Mousset, does that eminently American “The” in the English title, The Grand Chevalier Tour, suggest that M. Chevalier himself might be tempted, munificently, as so many others, to perform the sure-to-be-a-classic Great American Dance of the Turd?

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Performance Detail

I saw the premier of “The Great Chevalier Tour” – billed as the “Occasion for Monsieur Chevalier to visit all the places which have contributed to the success of the Ballet National Folklorique, with this love letter, tender and intimate, addressed as much to the people of Vanves as to Luxemburg, and danced by one of its most talented prodigal sons” – 7 March 2025 at Mairie de Vanves, in presence of Monsieur Le Maire de Vanves, Bernard Gauducheau. “The Great Chevalier Tour” is the brainchild of choreographer performer Simone Mousset, written by Lou Cope
with historic music composed and recorded by Maurizio Spiridigliozzi and set plan by Mélanie Planchard in collaboration with Simone Mousset and Lewys Holt.

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Festival Artdanthé

Simone Mousset’s “The Grand Chevalier Tour” premiered the 2025 edition of Artdanthé, founded in 1998, a mixed-discipline dance-performance festival featuring, especially, creations by emerging artists. Notable Artdanthé alumni include Boris Charmantz, named director of the Tanztheater Wuppertal in 2022, and Jeanne Candel, whose latest work was discussed in Best American Poetry/Beyond Words in September 2024 (Rockets, space, place, sets and the power of theater: Jeanne Candel’s “Fusées”).

Losing it [getting it] over a non adhesive barricade tape [By Tracy Danison]

“Losing it” by Samaa Wakim and Samar Haddad King. Photo © Christian Altorfer

Samaa Wakim and Samar Haddad King get it just right with Losing it, their sound and dance performance exploring the experience of any war zone, thinking especially of the experience of the Gaza war and events on the West Bank. Losing it uses voice, synthesizer and about 30 feet of 3-inch wide green barricade tape stretched across a shallow stage. The performance succeeds as good esthetics and dance performance.

Potential exiles should keep it in mind as good dance performance.

In imagining how many ways a body can dance around a barricade tape, Samaa Wakim and  Samar Haddad King get at what ought to be a home truth: separation offers no solution to conflict (even if both individuals and groups can persist a long, long, long time in a state of extreme conflict and call it living).

Haddad King shapes performance space and Wakim does performer movement. There is a natural synchronization to the piece that points to what I think must be a friendship.

“Kingdom of Noise” came to mind from the first not very loud sounds of Losing it.

I had always thought “Kingdom of Noise” one of the many traditional epithets for Hell, like “Tophet” or “Tartarus”. Nope. It’s C.S. Lewis.

It’s hard to imagine Lewis deliberately saying something sensible, so, for me, from now on, it’s Haddad King what gives “Kingdom of Noise” the sense of Hell. With a couple of whistles and squawks, she manages to create a sound composition that actually provoked in me a remembered stink of diesel exhaust, heat and frightened people. It seems to have subjugated those who do not have such memories, too.

Within the Kingdom of Noise, Samaa Wakim, a very good dancer, performs the fullness of the the non adhesive barricade tape. In space: over and around, under, over it, touching it, pressing it, bulging it, but never getting too far from or too close to [it: facing reinforced concrete blockades with matching blast-resistant agent booths]. In gesture and style: small and careful, calculated shuffle: a calibrated equilibrist, taut, always aware that the tightrope is three inches wide and sharp on both edges [and keeping in mind the kid don’t get shot up like a Swiss cheese as she is slipping off and falling the foot and half to the ground].

“Losing it” by Samaa Wakim and Samar Haddad King. Photo © Christian Altorfer

Given the sturdy long-lastingness of the extruded polyester of barricade tape, Wakim could very well have been dancing with the first non adhesive barrier tape ever extruded. The thing was invented in the early 1960s, just in time to rope off the path of civil rights marches – that demand for inclusion as well as an end to Jim Crow exclusion that also raised up woman rights and generally, fairness.

Perhaps a sign of quantum entanglement, in the early 1960s, my Dad had rigged up a model silicon extruder in our basement; he was a processing engineer and very keen on staying hands-on.  Born in the sign of Cancer, it appears I am also a native of extrusion – like Wakim and Haddad King.

Watching Wakim turn and twist and pace so beautifully around the extruded non adhesive barricade tape, I realize that while Wakim and Haddad King have actually been born into it, non adhesive barricade tape and I have been, one way or another, cohabiting most of my adult life. Unfortunately, non adhesive barricade tape and I are unlikely to co-terminate: the ethic of separation seems to be growing from bloody strength to bloody strength.

Wakim has her barricade tape as green, as in “green line”, “Palestine-Israel”. I see that.

But, in some measure, thanks to the success of her and Haddad King’s piece, my non adhesive barricade tapes say things like “Whites Only”, “Economy Class”, “Other Passports”, “Police Line Do Not Cross”… And everybody obeys them unless somebody takes them down.

If, in the future, and think on this, if you please, a blazon is needed for our time, it could very well be “non adhesive barricade tape, per bend and bend sinister, embattled”.

Inclusion not separation is the thing we seem to want to fail at.

________

 

I saw Losing it by Samaa Wakim et Samar Haddad King as a feature of the Festival Faits d’Hiver at Théâtre de la Bastille on 7 February 2025. Co-created, choreographed and performed by

Samaa Wakim and Samar Haddad King, the 7 February performance featured lighting by Cord Haldun and Music  from Turathy (album Autostrad). Losing it was first produced in 2021 at Festival Theaterformen, Hanover, Germany, as part of the Goethe Institute’s 2019-2020 “Un|controlled Gestures” project.

Nobody is getting off this train: interpreting “Qui Som”, a performance by Baro d’Evel [By Tracy Danison]

“Qui som” by Baro d'Evel. Photo © Christophe Raynaud de Lage

Not too terribly long ago I was in a pretty fancy café on Paris' famous île Saint Louis. I fell into a chat with an American guy. He told me that France had a problem. That problem, this guy said, is in Saint Denis, a big suburban town to the north of the île Saint Louis.

From his chair, the guy portentously pointed as due north as he could.

I’m a smart-ass guy, sometimes, so I said, “The Monarchy”?

The basilica in Saint Denis, the city itself, is the burial ground of French royalty as well as the site of a lot of public housing for immigrants, mostly from former French colonies and current overseas territories, and since the 2024 Olympics, two, yes, I have written "two", public swimming pools for its lucky and remarkably stable population of 113,000. The tombstones in Saint Denis, by the way, go a ways towards showing that, even way way back, in the minds of its peoples “Europe” is a place that extends from Cape Finisterre on the Atlantic to that place somewhere above the Caspian Sea where people mistake oars for threshing sticks.

However, I asked my smart-aleck question because I grew up knowing that, because I’m so obviously what I am and he thus thinks that he can say any old word that begins with “n-“ around a guy like me that he could also confide some Azimovian “psychohistory” about “Islam” and “Western Civilization”.

Guys like him and me get our historiography from the Foundation series.

As I hoped, my smart-alecky question farted a little Hegelian doubt between us.

Politely resentful, the American guy-just-like-me, hesitated. I was able to get away.

You would think, though, heavily armed as we all are in our current head-long rush for some brand of Civilizational Apocalypse, Headstrong Ignorance himself would have begun to realize that, at the very least, the fault is not in the stars. Or that guys-like-me might do well to suspend the traditional belief that because a man can afford an over-priced cup of coffee, his fulminations can’t possibly be just plumb dumb or crazy.

But, no.

“Qui som” by Baro d'Evel. Photo © Christophe Raynaud de Lage

Indeed, the players of the performance troupe Baro d’Evel from Catalonia brought the home truth here home to me a couple weeks back with their lively and hopeful piece Qui Som (“Who are we – Who we are”) at Maison de la Culture de Seine Saint Denis, Bobigny or MC93. As a fact, the theater is not all that far from where guys-like-me such the American psychohistorian above, are claiming that “Islam” is skulking around those old royal tombstones, muttering the Coran, if not snorting coke. Anyway, not working.

Qui Som put it this way: “Nobody is getting off this train”. The phrase is meant as a call to solidarity in the face of catastrophe, of course. But I understood it as more like the Army marching song: “Aint’ no use lookin’ down/ain’t no discharge on the ground/Ain’t no use in lookin’ back, Jody got your Cadillac!/Ain’t no use in goin’ home, Jody got your girl an’ gone! Airborne! Airborne! Airborne”. Pugnacious-sounding resignation to the orphan yonder with his gun.

I rather liked being a soldier and I liked Baro d’Evel and Qui Som but both a train I can’t get off and Jody running off with my girl leave me depressed.

Indeed, don’t get me wrong. Qui Som is a really good show. Well done, Baro d’Evel! Their shtick is good: a flustered MC with the ability to get on with the show in spite of messy slip ups into an imponderable slime and into a sea of plastic trash, of much disaster and missed opportunity… A cast able to turn clay pots into hats and those hats into masks and masks into…

Well, it seems, there is little bit of magic still in this world of autonomous fighting drones and precision strikes that kill hecatombs…

All hail the ancestor Vaudeville, the messiah of the modern era: where apocalypse can amuse as well as kill…

Qui Som ends with a marching band. Spectators are invited to join a dancing fête in the theater foyer. The Baro d’Evel troupe have it right. Everything is still possible. But.

Usually ready to hang around, especially at MC93, where the bar-cafeteria is really gemütlich, I instead slink away, take my bike, don’t bother with my wet poncho, fade into the pouring rain.

It comes down to this: what do you do when a body is not sure how to frame the answer because a body is not sure what the operative question is or even if there is an operative question?

And, then: Ain’t no use in lookin’ down, nobody is getting off this train until it gets to where it’s going.

__________

I saw “Qui Som”, created and directed by Camille Decourtye and Blaï Mateu Trias at the MC93, Maison de la Culture de Seine Saint Denis, Bobigny, 25 January 2025, performed by members of the troupe Baro d’Evel, including Lucia Bocanegra, Noëmie Bouissou, Camille Decourtye, Miguel Fiol, Dimitri Jourde, Chen-Wei Lee, Blaï Mateu Trias, Yolanda Sey, Julian Sicard, Marti Soler, Maria Carolina Vieira, Guillermo Weickert with participation of Luc Delafrênée and Yasmin Nahioul of the La petite troupe de la MC93.

Chiharu Shiota: The Soul Trembles, Blood Pumps, Flesh Quickens [By Tracy Danison]

“Uncertain Journey”, Chiharu Shiota. Photo © Grand Palais

How better to attract enormous crowds and dithyrambic media reviews than masses of single red threads stretching from a single point into red clouds floating just under the ceiling? What more likely to attract unruly multitudes than recondite video loops of a 50-something woman from Japan crawling around in dirt among tree roots or shivering under the mud plopping from her shower head? Or, better, what is more likely to invite murmurs of wonder than video clips of said lady’s sets for Wagner’s Ring Cycle operas? And, of course, what more attractive than said lady's showing off her prize collection of scales old window frames? And doll-house bric à brac picked up at an ex-East Berlin flea market?

 

“Connecting Small Memories”, Chiharu Shiota. Photo © Grand Palais

Well, I don’t know if I’d recommend the approach to artist friends, but it does work: the crowds pour in and lookers do genuinely seem to love what the find. Also, from looking myself, I do know that the said 50-something from Japan, the artist Chiharu Shiota, definitely does know something about art and from knowing about art, knowing about appealing to people. The Soul Trembles, her exhibition, the first for the work-in-progress re-opening of the Grand Palais, is a top-of-the-line artistic achievement. “Tremble” here has the sense of “quickening, as ‘a leaf in the wind’” not of “quaking in fear, as ‘a betrayed soldier’".

 

“Inside – Outside”, Chiharu Shiota. Photo © Grand Palais

Shiota’s stated artistic intention is to “enable anybody from anywhere to find an echo of their own emotion in her work”. Her approach to the big wide theme of “presence in absence” in The Soul Trembles seems to anchor less on works presented and more on personal reflection on and personal experience of the vision underpinning the visual experience of the works presented.

 

“Prayer”, Chiharu Shiota. Photo © Grand Palais

This rather complex distancing and refocusing – visual experience of the work, experience of visual experience, personal reflection, vision to visual experience – has an unexpected effect. A body feels that Shiota just sort of nestles up snug with the looker, shares her bulging photo album; she giggles and mugs, points sublime details with her stubby fingers. There are studies of Shiota's own hands, for example, or videos of short performances such as the mud shower mentioned earlier, whose esthetic value is in the experience they represent for her and through her for the looker, rather than visual esthetic of the physical thing. I expect you can call her approach “meta-art.”

 

“In silence”, Chiharu Shiota. Photo © Grand Palais

A looker winds up considering or feeling Shiota's take on the work presented as much as on the work or the work's concept just as it is. Also, her works very often take the shape of a simple personal concern: the strands of red yarn represent/are blood in the body, not the symbolism of blood or even the biology of blood, but blood's simple, bloody existence, for instance. Or a work may have the shape of personal experience, for instance, a burnt piano to which a wave of surreal dismay at the fire that destroyed it somehow remains clinging after all these years. Often, a piece is shared common-personal experience: who hasn’t already seen the peeling window frames she’s put on display? The window frames are positioned within the exhibition in a way to remind the looker that a view is, above all, framed.

 

“Accumulation - Searching for the Destination”, Chiharu Shiota. Photo © Grand Palais

Shiota’s meta-art resonates with the public; lookers above all seem to enter into a friendly dialogue with her. As they might with a neighbor grubbing out a back garden, they compliment her efforts, comment to each other on her particular visualizations and visions and those she shares with everybody else. “So, Chiharu”, they seem to say, pointing to a photo, “Ouf, golly, You stretched out all those red threads into a red cloud? Just so we can speak about blood: relations, biology, symbology”? Or, with her at the looker's elbow: “Chiharu? You made the set for emotionally gigantic operas like Gotterdammerung and Siegfried? I see Brunhilde. I see Siegfried. Was it you made the fringe of the curtains or what? It’s hard to tell from this opera video; is your work in itself or part of something else"? And with a smile of contentment, "That puzzle is the point."

 

View of the exhibition "The Soul Trembles", Chiharu Shiota : opera sets. Photo © Grand Palais

When packing the emergency exile bag, don’t forget to make a note of Shiota’s exhibition but also of pianist Keiichiro Shibuya’s March 14 Concert Miroir fantôme (Mirror Ghost). The cancelled concert ticket will get you in for a night-visit, the last visit, to The Soul Trembles.

The Miroir fantôme concert themes around voice, which is re-imagined as a ghost of the real thing: synthesized sounds and voices in a phantasmagoric ambiance. “The piano of Keiichiro Shibuya, the single human presence in the concert”, the programmers write, “Is a metaphor for a humanity confronted with the feeling of impending apocalypse”.

Sounds like just the thing!

________

I visited Chiharu Shiota’s installation “The Soul Trembles” in company with my partner Karine at the Grand Palais on 6 February 2025. Keiichiro Shibuya’s “Concert Miroir fantôme (Mirror Ghost)” takes place Friday 14 March 2025 at 21h. The entrance to both concert and exhibition is at Entrée Clarence Dillon, Galeries 10.1. “The Soul Trembles” will be open for post-concert visiting from 22h to 23h30.    

Big news from Hungary! Specters stalk Europe (and world) says Boglárka Börcsök’s and Andreas Bolm’s “Figuring Age”

"Figuring Age" by Boglárka Börcsök and Andreas Bolm. Photo © Patricio Cassinoni

If somebody dressed up in Blackface for a very sympathetic and strong solo performance about Frederick Douglass and his struggle to abolish slavery, how would a body take that? How should a body take that? I think that most sensible people would take one look and just walk right out the door: Blackface? Are you joking?

But what about young people play acting old people – “Oldface”? Looking around me, sensible people don’t seem so prickly as to that. The spellchecker underlines the word in red. “Oldface”: the young playing the old. I’ll add it to my personal dictionary.

I am certainly no sensible person, but I wanted all the same to walk right back out when I saw Boglárka Börcsök – the talented, well-trained and cultivated performer and choreographer of Figuring Age, the evening’s one-woman performance around oldness and part of Festival Everybody 2025 at Carreau du Temple, Paris.

Boglárka Börcsök is streaked pale with whited greasepaint. Vital, serious-eyed, concentrated, Börcsök stands in the central place of what seems a hospice tent, over-heated and too-white bright, with a hospice bed to one side, her leftside. I notice that Börcsök wears a white blouse and transparent surgical gloves, clipped mid-finger. She leans forward in that way some old ladies – my girlfriend, Karine, for instance – especially, do.

Standing there in the light of the tent, Börcsök is channeling the single spirit of Éva, Irén and Ágnes, pioneers of modern dance in Hungary. These women were battered first as women in the post-1918 keep Hungary great national, tradition and murder whirlwind that brought fascism, war and massacre through into the mid-1940s. Then as dancers, the women were officially repressed as bourgeois avatars in post-1945 communist Hungary.

 

"Figuring Age" by Boglárka Börcsök and Andreas Bolm. Photo ©  Lukáš Horký

Like a specter then, Börcsök in Oldface picks a stiff and unsteady way through the spectators who fill the few ordinary seats and the whole floor of the tent. I stand upright somewhere to her right, my arms crossed; in what passes for a corner. My old back has decided this: I avoid sitting on the floor at all times.

As Börcsök moves, she tells telling bits and pieces of Éva’s, Irén’s and Ágnes’ girlhood, womanhood; a bit about dancing. Can these things be separated? She asks often for help getting up or around.

Also, I notice, my hackles giving a little sigh, she orders people into situations more suitable. Gently, so as a sensible person might not notice. But it’s there, in the performance, in my experience, in the old.

I am thinking. “There is a difference between infirmity and oldness”.

I furiously remember my great grandmother, brittle and luminous as a paper lantern. Weak. But strong: “Sweetie, a-now. Your hand”. Once, my mother has me open a Mason jar of some preserve she’s put up years before, and while I’m struggling with it, jokes she’d not be dying. Instead, she’d wither down to a wisp of a command lingering at the bottom of one of those Mason jars. She’d wither down, she says, to Sibyl with diktat.

Oldness, I am thinking now, is, after all – and Börcsök, it seems to me, is also semaphoring this –  becoming weak while continuing the habit of strong. Exhaustion is weakness’ killing stroke.

As performance, Boglárka Börcsök’s Oldface shtick certainly works for me.

But then, maybe it is her theory of ghosts, or, rather, theory of haunting, that is really at work inspiring the deep ambivalence and strong praise in this essay, not the greasepaint or figuring in Oldface.

Börcsök says there are two kinds of ghost: the eaten ones, the ones who have become part of a body and the merely swallowed ones, undigested bits. The former, I guess, would be transparent ghosts, see-through, like new glasses, like history, adjusting or distorting vision. The latter, I guess, would be specters like Scrooge’s Jacob Marley, Banquo or Hungarian Admiral Horthy’s desperately reactionary post-1918 nation and tradition regency or Victor Orban’s 2024 illiberal democracy, haunting the present and veiling the future.

______

I saw “Figuring Age”, written and performed by Boglárka Börcsök 14 February 2025 at Carreau du Temple, Paris. “Figuring Age” is based on the film documentary “The art of movement” by Börcsök and Andreas Bolm, a film maker. The film features the real versions of the three aged modern dance creators evoked in Börcsök’s one-woman show.

 

On being human: dancer, choreographer Xavier Lot talks about Alice Davazoglou’s “Danser ensemble” [By Tracy Danison]

“Danser ensemble” dance performance by Alice Davazoglou. Photo © L’échangeur-CDCN

Carreau du Temple has some of the best dance performance programming in Paris. Its annual Festival Everybody, from 14- 18 February in 2025, is dedicated to the proposition that every body – every shape of individual, they mean – has a place in the sun. A "woke" festival if ever there were.

Since just after the end of the pandemic, the festival has managed to offer a little something for every penchant while exploring, through dance, performance, plain fun and information, the multiple senses of “difference” – Festival Every Body 2024: Performing with difference.

The festival offers fitness and dance workshops, intelligent discourse and masques à la Christopher Marlowe (that are now called “voguing balls”), but I mostly stick to live performance. This year I’m seeing Pour Sortir au Jour by Olivier Dubois, around his personal experience of the dancing body; Figuring Age by Boglarka Börcsok and Andreas Bolm, around body memory and remembrance; Chemical Joy by Lenio Kaklea, around consumption as pleasure; and Danser Ensemble, a dance performance by Alice Davazoglou, a performer and, now, choreographer, with Down syndrome.

I am familiar with Dubois’ work and Börcsok, Bolm and Kaklea will be new to me. Alice Davazoglou, though, was the featured performer in Mickaël Phelippeau’s De Françoise à Alice at the first annual Festival. I covered the piece in About Alice, me & every body: difference and disability. She returns to the festival as a choreographer for Danser Ensemble.

In a telephone conversation earlier this week, I asked Xavier Lot, a member of the piece’s all-star cast, himself a 40-year veteran of modern and contemporary dance and performance, about Davazoglou’s transformation from performer to choreographer.

I thought I heard swallowed indignation – a muttered “What a question!” – before he answers that, basically, people are not test monkeys in some Superman’s laboratory of capitalism.

“Everybody has a right to try”, he tells me, “Everybody has a right to err”.  And, he continues, trial and error are not about discovering some “unrealized talent” or uncovering some “hidden performance potential” or even “doing your best”.

 

“Danser ensemble” by Alice Davazoglou. Photo © L’échangeur-CDCN

In the big picture, Davazoglou’s role as choreographer is about the freedom to be a human being, Down syndrome or whatever or not.

Lot has a long association with Art21, an arts development group for Down people – Davazoglou contacted him through the group about trying out for Danser Ensemble.

In then accepting to join, he remarks, his biggest worry was that he or other cast members might steal Alice Davazoglou’s show. The Danser Ensemble cast includes choreographers and performers from across the top of the spectrum of modern, contemporary and hip hop dance performance, including Lot himself,  Gaëlle Bourges, Lou Cantor, Bruce Chiefare, Nathalie Hervé, Marc Lacourt, Bérénice Legrand, Béatrice Massin, Mickaël Phelippeau and Alban Richard.

Lot says these worries were just that, worries.

Danser Ensemble is a team affair like another, he says. “It is very constructed and carefully directed” by Alice Davazoglou, he says, with a base of 26 drawings and an interpretative script to respect, as well as her sound choices and her directorial commentaries on different scenes or movements. She has [two] assistants who work with her to make sure her wishes are clear and understood.

“Developing Danser Ensemble was the easiest and least tense process I’ve ever experienced” Lot says, lingering wonder in his voice. “We put it all together in two weeks and there was no tension. Amazing.”

“I was [also] worried that my partner, Bruce Chiefare, might be a bit mismatched with me – he’s a hip hopper at the top of his career and I’m … a contemporary dancer near retirement”. It turns out that, as a choreographer, Davazoglou has the flair for matchmaking. Lot says it seems spectators also feel as comfortable with the duo with Chiefare as he does: “People say that it looks like we’ve danced together for years...”. He observes that while Chiefare is an energetic hopper at the top of his game, he’s also a bonsai hobbyist, which says a lot about his ability to work well with others.

Xavier Lot feels honored to have been chosen for Danser Ensemble. He has spent a good part of his career working with such underserved populations as immigrants or prisoners, who, he says, like himself, are not born into the circles where contemporary dance is understood as a possible career path.

“I’ve always seen myself not so much as a dance performer but, rather, as an artist dialoguing with creation-creativity using dance…Someone who opens doors for those who might not otherwise have access to the movement arts and who want to be actors and masters of their own movement”.

 “Working with Alice is a privilege”, he says, “A sort of homage to my career in movement art”. Until now, Lot notes, he’s been working with ‘exterior body movement’. In retirement, he says, he will be working on “interior body movement”, developing an existing but part-time Feldenkrais and acupuncture practice.

“Danser ensemble” dance performance by Alice Davazoglou. Photo © L’échangeur-CDCN

“Ulysse” – Josette Baïz and the gifts of today’s un-classic ballet [By Tracy Danison]

“Ulysse”, performance Groupe Grenade. Photo © LéIo Ballani

O! Muse! apart, the only words I remember from the Odyssey, blind Homer’s adventures of Ulysses after the destruction of Troy, is the epithet “rosy-fingered Dawn”.

I’ve been sweetly bouncing off it since I first heard it. Dawn’s long, flexed, pale-pink fingers on the pillow, her tapering index, a bit of red polish stuck to the nail, her, somehow, competent thumb, her closed mouth, somehow, smiling. A morning as calm as Dawn’s breathing, a world outside as easy as her body here inside with me, asleep.

The sense of bouncing sweetly off was my first experience as Josette Baïz’ child-performed version of acclaimed choreographer and dancer Jean-Claude Gallotta’s 1981 Ulysse unfolded on the stage at Carreau du Temple the other evening, a demonstrator part in the dance festival Faits d’Hiver’s 2025 memory and remembrance theme.

Ulysse is an – is, maybe, the – Ur-choreography of la nouvelle danse française (contemporary dance in France). Josette Baïz, like Gallotta, a winner of Jaque Chaurand’s Concours de Bagnolet (1982), was one of the original performers of the piece.

“Ulysse”, performance Groupe Grenade. Photo © LéIo Ballani

In 1989, Baïz went to work with children in the immigrant-dominated north suburbs of Marseille and, in 1992, she founded the child-centered choreographic development Groupe Grenade, working with children from 6 to 18 on contemporary, urban and traditional dance. Groupe Grenade also did Ulysse in 2007.

A loose and refreshing ballet pour demain (“ballet for tomorrow”), as they said back then, Ulysse has everything a body loves in classic ballet: elegant arms stretching high, smoothly pumping legs, whirling, twirling, pointing, leaping eyes, fingers, fingers, breasts, bellies, knees to toes. Internal energies of body and mind made visible.

But Ulysse is and was (at the very least, one of the first examples of) un-classic ballet. Un-classic ballet is a movement-centered version of “modern dance”, a ballet pour demain, a nouvelle danse française, but is, especially, a “contemporary dance” that is, at its heart, an expression of an individual or group of individuals, on this occasion, on 24 January 2025, as we experienced it at Carreau du Temple, today’s dance.  

Contemporary dance fits with time differently than classic ballet. Ballet operates outside of time, is meant as the Platonic, the eternal, the perfect. Contemporary dance makes its own time; today’s dance is meant to be the flow of a moment, more or less, I reckon, à la Heraclitus.

“Ulysse”, performance Groupe Grenade. Photo © LéIo Ballani

And, if hard to put into words, the difference between classic ballet and contemporary dance is a very real experience. If a circa 1877 Swan Lake fills a stage with the vision and emotion of a story, the 1981 Ulysse fills a space with movement and individual expression. If, like classic ballet, today’s dance – contemporary dance – is complex and challenging, contemporary dance is somebody’s real-body-to-somebody else’s-real body. Contemporary dance is intimate, intra-reactive, not, like classic ballet, gesture to gesture, not call and response. In contemporary dance, even synchronization is improvisation.

But most of all, as I sit watching Baïz’ child-danced Ulysse, I remember that contemporary dance is an avatar of the world people aspired to live in the “after 1968”. From memory, iconic slogans such as Sous les pavées, la plage and Il est interdit d’interdire, are calls for more expression: more equality, less authority, more pleasure.

The far-reaching culture initiatives of François Mitterand’s presidency, which began in 1981, including the unique (in the world, I believe) regional dance centers (CCN) set up in 1984, have socio-cultural complements in the abolition of the death penalty, the creation of a 39-hour workweek, higher minimum wages and enhanced income assistance; in what contemporary dance carries as an expression of culture.

“Ulysse”, performance Groupe Grenade. Photo © LéIo Ballani

The long-drive for “child-centered learning” and against corporal punishment in schools took firm cultural and institutional shape in the 1980s. And, as I watch child-danced Ulysse, it is the social achievement  of that drive forward that I am seeing in it that gives me the deepest pleasure.

Disciplined, earnest, practiced and concentrated, the children of Baïz’ Groupe Grenade express themselves as childrenbetween 8 and 12 years old – that’s what they are, after all, children between 8 and 12 years old, not apprentices, learners.

Among them, not a trace of strain or suffering. No bared teeth, no fearful grimaces.

And, as I congratulate Josette Baïz on the performance, I reflect that her Groupe Grenade is still going strong and that over almost 40 years she must have had hundreds, even thousands of youngsters who have learned un-classic ballet, contemporary dance.

“Ulysse”, performance Groupe Grenade. Photo © LéIo Ballani

And after learning, most of them have gone off to do other things elsewhere in society.

So, contemporary dance has given each one of the child dancers of Groupe Grenade, past and present, the experience of creating time, initiating, responding, synchronizing, improvising, expressing themself as themselves and as themselves. They’ve brought that experience, will bring that experience forward into the world.

Good news when there isn’t so much to go around.

Thanks, Josette Baïz, for the gift of children dancing as children.

_________

I saw Ulysse by Jean-Claude Gallotta, with original music by Henry Torgue & Serge Houppin, as adapted by Josette Baïz with assistance from Stéphanie Vial, Jeanne Vallauri, Sinath Ouk and Camille Cortez, on 24 January 2025 at Carreau du Temple. The piece was performed by members of Groupe Grenade, all between  8 and 13 years old, including Nour Belmekki, Jules Bertolo, Margaux Bourrel, Elena Chevereau, Ella Christophers, Manon Collins, Anatole Derieux, Marius Duseaux-Olive, Lilas Lautrey, Chiara Menard, Issam Ousseini, Antoine Palazzo, Olivia Rothschild, Salomé Rudloff, Maxence Siol, Lise-Marie Sumian, Sandro Villena. Claudine Ginestet was costumer, Lucas Borg handled sound and Erwann Collet did lighting and staging.

“ Ulysse de Jean Claude Gallotta” a study of the historic choreography by journalist Nathalie Yokel, part of the “Collection Chefs-d’oeuvre de la danse”, editor Philippe Verrièle, is available from publishers micadanses-Paris/Nouvelles Éditions Scala, Paris.

Amore Infinito: On résistance, ideals, the chain of biological being and Sarah Valente [By Tracy Danison]

“The Edge of Choice”, Sarah Valente, 2024, aluminium. Photo : © Allison Borgo

Carnet pour l’exil # ... The exile needs, of course, to compulsively walk around the chosen city.

But they also need ideals. Especially here, in Paris.

Jumping Jesus! Ideals!

A body may believe that, in old, disabused Paris, atavistic Revolutionary zeal or bootless experiments with Fourrierism or Blanquism or too many hours studying Babeuf has muddied the country’s ideals. Indeed, the exile may have noticed parents and officials alike exhorting, even seen placards urging, children and other citizens alike to resister. Often in the image of the Résistants of the last world war.

The exile, still muddled, in spite of Death of a Salesman, by the American cultural belief that winning is everything and aware that Résistants were mostly losers by their resistance, may imagine that parents and officials in this country are encouraging children, and citizens, too, to become drone-savvy partisans of socio-political Luddism. Or worse.

 

“The Accidental Miracle”, Sarah Valente, 2024, bronze, mother of pearl. Photo : © Allison Borgo

But, no. Résistance means “Respect your own ideals”, not “Resistance”, no accent.

So, though an exile might not know it just to look at her, visual artist Sarah Valente is in her way, a “résistant”. But when I walked into the Galérie Romero Paprocki on the rue Saint Claude in the Marais a couple of weeks before Christmas last year, I wanted to have a look at how her exhibition, called Amore Infinito, was dealing with a shared ideal.

She has created a story with esthetic accessories – swords, statuary, offerings, keepsakes –  about people as part of a biological chain of being. We share that ideal: to really understand a human person as an integral part of other big wiggly wormy furry photosynthetic tiny slimy Life, capital “l”.

 

“The Bliss of The Universe”, Sarah Valente, 2024, bronze, mother of pearl, pink tourmaline. Photo : © Allison Borgo

Observing that it is impossible to describe and take in the whole of Life as described – she means all that archaebacteria, eubacteria, protista, fungi, plants, animals and all the dips and curves and controversies and rumbles therein and by – Sarah Valente says people have wound up forgetting altogether that they are part of the chain of Life. People’s inaction is not just puzzling, she says, it seems unnatural. “If somebody has a baby, they take one look at it and want to protect it with their own life. So why do they look at Earth Life and have the urge to tear it up?”

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Galérie Romero Paprocki, 8 rue Saint Claude, specializes in contemporary art. Expect a pleasant visit. As a visual artist, Sarah Valente concerns herself with “the hidden sides of the world, the little-known aspects of nature”. Her projects include Jungle Canopy Mapping, The Birds, the Microcosm and The Hive. Galérie Romero Paprocki represents, in addition to Sarah Valente, other such woman artists as Pauline Guerrier, Paola Siri Renard, Deborah Bowmann and Marion Flament. The gallery’s current exhibition, Le cose che non sappiamo (“Things we don’t know”), is a group show​. Follow up your visit by a brisk walk that will justify the last real Tarte Tatin in town in a café not far off the rue Saint Claude.

A nicely served portion of fake fries to start the new year in performance [By Tracy Danison]

"Patatas fritas falsas" by Agnès Mateus & Quim Tarrida. Photo: © Quim Tarrida

A contemporary clown and master of multi-lingual stand-up performance, Agnés Mateus (with co-writer Quim Tarrida behind the curtains) has a preternatural ability to grasp the nettle hidden in things and make the spectator think while laughing about it. If King Lear had had Mateus as clown instead of that other guy, Cordelia would be as popular and cheerful a first name as Catherine.  

The last time I saw Mateus on stage she was doing woman-murder – Rebota rebota y en tu cara explota. Even if it doesn’t appear in most school curriculum, woman-murder is a rather well-known (at least among women) as well as a popular, if under-reported, blood sport. Mateus’ piece around woman-murder leaves a body not so much aghast as thoughtful: in the end, it’s pretty clear that it is one of those things that are quite deliberately constructed out of social perception, not, like so many other things, merely ignored.

And afterward, over wine, in the days that follow, the effect of Mateus’ way of clowning out a subject leaves a body even more thoughtful: little, apparently unconnected things, such as that overcrowded and inadequate women’s toilets may be the norm because, like certain consequences of man-woman relations, certain aspects of female-need is just constructed out of architecture.

For Patatas frites falsas (“Fake fries”), Mateus’ shtick is “Francoism”. A body understands Francoism as “fascism”, a word whose use is currently disputed and frowned upon. Maybe she’s avoiding it because the controversy makes it unfunny. But more likely is that the fascist varietal she calls “Francoism” is more stageable, even for the historically ignorant.

Apart from the trick of making a body laugh while confronting un-loveable fact, what Rebota rebota and Patatas falsasshare is the capacity to open out on the whole tableau of the unloveable thing in question, so that a body walks away from the show not so much aghast as thoughtful.

"Patatas fritas falsas" by Agnès Mateus & Quim Tarrida. Photo: © Quim Tarrida

So, I walked out of Patatas falsas feeling my feelings, yes, but also thinking that I should pay more attention to the state of mind that is fascism – fascism as an integral part of a socially-shared reality editor, a shared psychology, a shared social construct. In other words, fascism is definitely not just a political phenomenon, it’s an avatar of how we construct ourselves to experience the world around.

As a political phenomenon, Spain’s fascism varietal, is forever associated with the dour little leader Francisco Franco. Franco’s political organ was Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalista, whose slogan was “Spain first”. The words suggest tradition, aggressive national unity and a certain programmatic vacuity, while the length evokes the time – 40 years! –  this organ, Franco and Francoism imposed themselves on Spain. It all died with a whimper in 1975.

Throughout Patatas falsas, there’s a lot of running around, dramatic tension, bathing and projecting and spotting light, sound. But out this stagecraft and comic relief, two things seemed to me operative: lengthy vacuity and schizophrenia, contradictory doubleness.

For spectators, Patatas fritas falsas opens with a long, silent stare from the dark at the stage curtain. The curtain is a gigantic Franco-era-flag of Spain. It differs from Spain’s current flag in that a large, Teutonic-looking eagle seems to b--g-r some royal-looking arms. A body stares for what seems ages at this damned flag until is opens, segues, flag into stage of household appurtenances and a washing machine, a Mateus as female clown playing herself in different ways: as a more or less muttering, fuming and fizzing Bladder of Complaint, as the Bladder’s Tolerant Self as invoker, manipulator and interlocutor of the ghost of Franco as a dapper hand puppet, and, finally, as a vaguely insulting black angel that hands out conditional favors.

This spectator walks away from Patatas falsas with this idea of how the contemporary unmentionables of Francoism mainly work.

"Patatas fritas falsas" by Agnès Mateus & Quim Tarrida. Photo: © Quim Tarrida

First, there’s The Wait, as before the Franco flag. The Wait is the ruling principle of fascism, as it is in the military, where the slogan is “hurry up and wait” (and just as it is in drama, come to think of it – where The Wait induces surprise and “suspension of disbelief” or, more simply, a coming event!).If a body has ever had a bad boss, they will instinctually recognize, especially, The Wait.

The Wait, like Shiva, has three qualities: 1. indeterminate duration, because hurry up, be prepared, be ready – compulsive obsession – are the watchwords; 2. Cooling of the heels, partner, because a leader is the leader and wasting your time is The Leader’s Acknowledged Prerogative; 3. nervous expectation, because the next unexpected, indeterminate move is the very name of The Leader: exhausting enough to demoralize or paralyze all involved.

Within The Wait, “paranoid-schizophrenia” – the antagonized doubled aspect of character or personality or role – is the dominant psychic organization. In fact, the whole interest of the piece’s solo stand-up format seems to me to lay in the entanglement of the double points of view of paranoid schizophrenia.

In Patatas falsas, the main dramatic doubling takes form as poor temper and reproof or victimization and moralization or sin and virtue within the comic Bladder of Complaint and the virtuous Tolerant Self entanglement. Diffuse dissatisfaction followed by moralizing reproof cycles along until, beside itself, the clown divides into two distinct, antagonistic views in a single skin: Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Hyde (or Jekyll) is both in denial of the embarrassingly uncharitable Jekyll’s (Hyde’s) fuming and fizzing and made angry and fearful by Hyde’s (or Jekyll’s) ’s sinful self-regard and selfishness. The harmonization of the antagonists (and the performance) ends with this hoarse whimper

ich Hab’ angst, ich bin deine angst. (I am afraid, I am your fear!)

And here’s what Agnès Mateus has me thinking after the performance, over my wine. The schizophrenia may be more consequential than fascism.

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I saw “Patatas fritas falsas” (“Fake fries”), written and directed by Agnés Mateus and Quim Tarrida, performed by Agnès Mateus on 10 January 2025 at Théatre de la Bastille.

Live Performance Pilgrimage, with Walkabout: Normandy’s Spring International Festival of New Circus [By Tracy Danison]

Les filles du renard pâle, "Révolte". Photo © Kalimba

Just when good ideas for whiling away the coming months seem so thin on the ground, a great one comes along.

Spring, 16ème Festival international des nouvelles forms de Cirque (“Sixteenth International Festival of New Circus”), features pretty much five weeks of “New Circus”.

"New" Circus because it does not exploit other species: in New Circus, humans do the unexpected and extraordinary, the clowning and derring-do that makes circus such a unique experience.

 

Heka, “Gandini”. Photo © Camilla Greenwell

The Spring festival is an opportunity to make a pilgrimage into contemporary live-performance as well as to enjoy the best in real live people. Its 45 acts and 116 performances include innovations and permutations on the whole range of visual and performing arts plus the usual thrills and laughs: high-wires, bars, cages, wheels, trapeze, ropes, juggling, acrobatics, plunging and soaring, fantastic twirling, whirling, costumes brief and wild, eroticism.

And New Circus acts, like traditional circus acts, travel, are made for a wide, culturally-diverse audience. Beyond a little basic English, word-wisdom is not really needed.

The palette of intentions and artistic endeavors of the troupes performing at Spring at the festival are enormous: philosophy, morality, personal transformation are played out in the juggling ring and on the tight-wire.

 

Galapiat Cirque, “Courbatures”. Photo © Sébastien Armengol

With its Hot Dog and Frasques performances, for instance, Galactik Ensemble promises spectators acrobatic fresco, burlesque and human foible. Les filles du renard pâle - three woman acrobats and two woman musicians - bill a savage and sensual Révolte: the body is the vocabulary of revolution, they say. Circo Aero’s Trilokia turns on the Hand of Man. With a soaring of chimeras and phantasmagorias, dance, magic, prestidigitation, poetry and dream, the troupe aims to warn about the dangers at hand today.  

The festival’s walkabout potential complements its pilgrimage possibilities.

With performances at 65 urban and rural venues - town and village theaters, culture centers and outdoor and big top and in-the-landscape sites – the fesstival opens on pretty much, if not all, historic upper and lower Normandy. The old Duchy was and remains one of Europe’s north-south pivot points, a land in equal measure sea and country, fisher and farmer, sailor and soldier.

Cie EA EO - Neta Oren, “Biographie”. “Photo © Marc Lahore

Though lushly and deliciously, rurally, out of the way, Normandy, at least since1066 and all that happened, is also quite in the way: big towns and charming villages with easy links to Paris, London and the Low Countries.

With Faire Corps (“Unity-Solidarity”) as its guiding theme, Spring opens 5 March 2025 with Douce Révolution, an exciting in-situ exploration of new ways to enjoy live performance by the Cie des Mutants and Side Show at Théâtre du Champ Exquis in the Caen suburb of Blainville-sur-Orne. From Blainville, the festival invests all the historic territories of the ancient Duchy: Rouen, Littoral Seine Maritime, Cotentin, Orne, Manche, Eure and Calvados. It closes under the Big Top on 16 April with Théâtre des Frères Forman’s high-flying Conférence des oiseaux in the Presqu’île de Caen urban redevelopment area.

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Spring, 16ème Festival international des nouvelles forms de Cirque is a cooperative effort by the La Brèche, Pôle National Cirque de Normandie, Cherbourg-en-Cotentin, a regional artistic center focused on circus development and Cirque-Théâtre d’Elbeuf, a regional culture development center organized around circus history, equipment and production. The Spring festival website provides more complete information on companies, show-types, venues and a complete calendar of events. The Parcours tab on the site has suggestions for organizing an itinerant stay.

Circus Companies, Creators/Choreographers, Acts/Performances

Just below is the list of all circus companies involved in the festival along with an indication of the creator/choreographer and act/performance. A slash (“/ “) separates companies, the creator/choreographer is indicated to the right of the hyphen (“-“). The act/performance is indicated in italics after a comma.

Cie EA EO - Neta Oren, Biographies / Club Optimiste - Fanny Alvarez, Feu /  Groupe Acrobatique de Tanger - Raphaëlle Boitel, KA-IN / Cie KIAÏ - Cyrille Musy, Loops / Cie Defracto - Guillaume Martinet, Monographie  / Cie The Ratpack - Xavier Lavabre & Ann-Katrin Jornot, Sans regrets? / Cie Takakrôar, Si c'est sûr c'est pas peut-être / Galactik Ensemble, Hot Dog &  Frasques / Les filles du renard pâle - Johanne Humblet, Roue Giratoire, Révolte ou tentatives de l'échec  / Cie El Nucleo - Jimmy Lozano & Joana Pinard, L'Enjeu / Cie Bêstîa, Fratello / Cie MPTA - Mathurin Bolze Immaqaa, ici peut-être / Galapiat Cirque - Jonas Séradin, Préviens les autres - Elice Abonce Muhonen & Chloé Derrouaz, Courbatures  / Cie Baro d'evel, Qui som? / Cie MMFF - Arnaud Saury, Aimons-nous vivants / 36è promotion du CNAC, Martin Palisse & David Gauchard, Brûler d'envies / Circo Aereo - Jani Nuutinen, Trilokia : I’eau, Harbre & FerFeu /  Viivi Roiha, V / Cie El Nucleo - Jimmy Lozano & Joana Pinard, L'Enjeu / Cie Grensgeval & Circus Katoen, iRRooTTaa / Cie Lunatic - Cécile Mont-Reynaud, Entre les lignes / Cie Des mutants & Side-show - Aline Breucker & Quintijn Ketels, Douce révolution / Académie Fratellini & Béné Borth, Ça a l'air facile / Les Tréteaux de France - Olivier Letellier, Le théorème du pissenlit / La main de l'homme - Clément Dazin, Thomas Scotto, L'envers de nos décors / Cie UNA - Valia Beauvieux, Et la mer s'est mise à brûler / Cie Unlisted - Julian Vogel, Ceramic Circus / Cie Pilot Fishes - Léa Rault & Agathe Rault, En haut en bas /  Gandini Juggling - Sean Gandini & Kati Ylä-Hokkala, HEKA / La sociale K & Halem, Invisibles / Liam Lelarge & Kim Marro, La boule / Théâtre des frères Forman - Petr Forman, La conférence des oiseaux / Cie Quotidienne - Jérôme Galan, Nartiste /  Cie La Supérette, Nous on n'a rien vu venir... / Cie La Mondiale Générale, Réfugions-nous / H.M.G - Jonathan Guichard & Lauren Bolze Thaumazein / Théâtre en oeuvre - Jean-Yves Lazennec, Une Bérénice  / Victoria Belen & Milena Csergo / Elsa Caillat & Marie Vauzelle

On memory and remembrance in contemporary dance: Restart the present, wonder about it, and – Why not? – revive it [By Tracy Danison]

“iLaUNA” by Bilaka. Photo © Charlotte Costa

There’s a fin de siècle schadenfreude in our air du temps. YouTube spiritualists see souls fleeing the coming travails of those still earthbound.

But the frisson that comes when the past becomes the past while the future rustles someplace in the shadows doesn’t have to be one of apprehensive nostalgia or of excitable fortune-telling. At least, not for contemporary dance performance.

And certainly not for Christophe Martin, founder and director of Paris' annual Faits d’Hiver winter dance performance festival. He looks at the present, it seems to me, as the operating system and the past as an upgrade.

Noting that contemporary dance is now 60 years old and that it’s never too late to do something well, Martin announced last year that, for the first time in its history, Faits d’Hiver would have a theme: memory and remembrance. Twenty-twenty-five marks the festival's 27th edition.

 

“Ulysse”, Jean-Claude Gallotta/ Josette Baïz. Photo © Leonard Ballani

“Why bother to remember the past,” Christophe Martin writes in his introduction to 2025 program, “If not to restart the present, wonder about it, and – why not? – revive it? The work on Notre Dame shows how much restoring something requires adapting to the moment and discovery.”

 

“About Love and Death” by Emmanuel Eggermont. Photo © Jihye Jung

Memory, then, marks a dance artefact: a title, persons, places and sounds, along with, sometimes, choreographic notations, visual evidence, and/or community memory. Dominique Bagouet’s Nécessito, piece pour Grenade comes to mind. Likely as true for classic Swan Lake as for contemporary Nécessito, Bagouet viewed experience as the primary vector of dance performance: a performance, like an individual, is a singularity within a complex genealogy.

For contemporary dance performance (and maybe for classic and modern dance, too) remembrance is both stitching together and reverse engineering memory (or repertory). “… The issue goes well beyond [memory] to techniques, themes, evolutions…” Martin observes. “And all the rest of what we call contemporary-ness in dance performance needs continuous airing... Creation, re-creation, reprises, re-discoveries, homages and historic revivals are rich soils for an iteration of today’s choreographic concerns (and reflections of our society’s concerns, too)”.

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Faits d’Hiver 27th edition, Choreographers and Performances, 20 January - 15 February 2025

Dance performances take place in 20 venues in Paris and its near suburbs. A slash (“/”) between names indicates a collaborative work. “Re-creation” indicates a work in repertory; “Creation” indicates a premier.

Emmanuel Eggermont • About Love and Death, elegy for Raimund Hoghe …Jean-Claude Gallotta / Josette Baïz • Ulysse, re-creation ... Aurélie Berland / Christine Gérard • Automnales, Nu perdu, La Griffe, re-creation ... Raphaël Cottin • L’Éloge des possibles, creation ... Nathalie Pernette • Wakan - Un Souffle … Betty Tchomanga • Histoire(s) Décoloniales (Portraits croisés), creation ... Odile Duboc / Léo Lérus / Ioannis Mandafounis, and Ensemble chorégraphique du CNSMDP (Paris Conservatory) • Panorama danse, creation ... Carole Bordes • GIANTS, creation ... Geisha Fontaine & Pierre Cottreau • Ne faites pas la moue #1 ... Compagnie Mossoux-Bonté • Les nouvelles hallucinations de Lucas Cranach l’Ancien ....  Elodie Sicard • les Aspirants, creation... Sharon Eyal & Gai Behar • Love Chapter 2, creation … Samaa Wakim & Samar Haddad King • Losing it ... Bilaka • iLaUNA ... Thomas Lebrun / Bernard Glandier / Christine Bastin • 1998 … Perrine Valli • Kantik … Groupe FLUO / Benoit Canteteau • FOSSIL miniature (in situ format) ... Daniela Clementina De Lauri • LE FAS_BE, creation .... Sylvie Pabiot • Mes autres ... Structure-couple • L’Été … Tom Grand Mourcel • Solus Break … Maëva Lamolière • Looking for Carlotta and Yumi Fujitani / Naomi Mutoh • Hommage à Carlotta Ikeda, creation…

Nadia Vadori-Gauthier’s “One minute of dance a day”: Bearing witness to social transformation [By Tracy Danison]

"Une minute de danse par jour". Photo © Le prix de l'essence

As I write, Tuesday, 7 January 2025, the National Dance Theater at Palais du Chaillot has opened the season with a celebration of 10 years of dance performer and choreographer Nadia Vadori-Gauthier’s Une Minute de danse par jour (“One minute of dance a day”) project. In addition, Les Presses du reel has just published Une minute de danse par jour – 2015-2025 – Dix ans d'une œuvre pour notre temps.

During a talk published in The Best American Poetry/Beyond Words in 2017, Vadori-Gauthier told me that she put together Une minute as “an act of poetic resistance”, incarnating, even as it does today, a radical affirmation of personhood, asserting the central place of the body, especially, the female body, in public life.

In the wake of the first of the particularly vile terrorist attacks that marred the beginning and the end of 2015, along with the remarkable show of public solidarity for the République – that is, the liberal values the republic embodies – Vadori-Gauthier looked at her “resistance” as a “micro-political gesture” accompanying “a co-evolution toward a sweeter way of living”.

 

"Une minute de danse par jour". Photo © Le prix de l'essence

Her sense of Une Minute has evolved: she now sees it as a telltale for a broader mutation in human relations away from the immediate and physical to the mediated and virtual.

Neither Vadori-Gauthier’s commitment to dance as a radical incarnation of personhood – she originally intended to wind up Une Minute after a year –  nor the evolution of her thinking about the project’s sense and purpose are surprising. There are events – I am thinking of Russia’s full-scale attack on Ukraine on 24 February 2022 or the 7 October 2023 massacres in Israel – the effects of which are and will remain impossible to adequately describe or account for in history, or, for that matter, in words. But these effects, nevertheless, ripple and echo through the courses of lives and, through those lives, shape common reality.  

What was done in Paris between 7 January and 13 November 2015 is certainly one such event and Une Minute’s persistence and evolution are one of the effects.

 

"Une minute de danse par jour". Photo © Le prix de l'essence

On Wednesday, 7 January 2015 – that is, 18 Nivôse CCXXIII An of the French République – a pair of religious fanatics attacked the offices of the satirical-political weekly Charlie Hebdo, murdered 12 people and wounded 11 others. For dissing the Prophet Mohammed, the killers said. On Friday, 9 January, 20 Nivôse CCXXIII An, a lone gunman murdered four people in a kosher grocery. For being Jewish, he said.

On Friday, 11 January, 22 Nivôse CCXXIII An, about two million people (the city of Paris has a population of about 2 million), in addition to nearly four million people across the country, rallied in support of liberal values under the slogan Je suis Charlie (“I am Charlie”).

On Friday, 13 November, 23 Brumaire CCXXIV An – interesting to reflect that the revolutionary year begins at the September rentrée, the new year for schools, theaters and most other public living –  about 11 months later, using automatic rifles and suicide vests, nine religious fanatics murdered 130 people and wounded another 416.

 

"Une minute de danse par jour". Photo © Le prix de l'essence

These murders took place, essentially, at cafés where people were sitting outdoors and at a popular music hall in the 11^th arrondissement of Paris and in a crowd near the Stade de France sports stadium in the near-suburb of Saint Denis. They done it, the murderers said, because Paris is Babylon, cursèd whore of Abraham’s Big Three religions in retrospect – sounding a rather sinister ecumenical note.

Vadori-Gauthier originally intended Une Minute de danse par jour to last a year or so. But the sum of the events and, I suppose, doing Une minute day by day, she made her ask, she says, “What do you do when you can do nothing”?

And from there forward, Une minute, once a micro-political gesture asserting the body’s centrality became what she could do:bear witness an ongoing transformation in the way we relate to one another.

 

"Une minute de danse par jour". Photo © Le prix de l'essence

While she’s been dancing her one minute a day, she observes, “The physical act of sharing and solidarity have been fading out”. She points out that, if, for instance, a smartphone means greater ability to keep in touch with friends or to access money, it also means changing the nature of the ancient acts of keeping in touch and accessing money.

“Personal identity has moved on-line,” Vadori-Gauthier says. And with the move, many of our most basic social interactions became virtualized transactions. “Buying a baguette or lending 20 bucks to a friend or getting a contact number, even giving change to a beggar, is no longer about touching hands or exchanging cards or scooping change on the counter or even tossing coins into an old hat*,” she observes.

Maybe the increasingly felt stress and alienation, along with real disorders of mood, all often blamed on “the internet”, are actually due to the loss of ordinary physical contact.

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Nadia Vadori-Gauthier is an influential and active performer, choreographer and teacher. In addition to her decade-long "Une minute de danse par jour project", she regularly works with such dance performance artists and organizations as Margaux Amoros or the experimental collective La Ville en feu, both of whose contributions to performance have been reviewed in the Best American Poetry/Beyond Words.

Unsurprisingly, Vadori-Gauthier has been including other dance performers and choreographers in Une minute de danse par jour. But it turns out that confronting “What do you do when you can do nothing”? is not just an increasingly pertinent question since 2015, answering it requires real personal investment, as well as Herculean commitment. “It takes four hours to make one minute of dance video”, Vadori-Gauthier told me. Getting more dancers contributing has her spending those four hours on the film editing application. More ironic still, she finds that she continues doing her minute of dance anyway, on her own. She calls it “shadow dancing”.

Contact Nadia Vadori-Gauthier through her dance company, Cie Le prix de l’essence or through the Une minute de danse par jour site, also home to a fantastic visual archive.

Maud Blandel: the naked eye of powerful dance experience [By Tracy Danison]

“L’Oeil-nu” by Maud-Blandel. Photo © Margaux Vendassi_Camille-D_Tonnerre

Maud Blandel’s dance performance L’Oeil nu (“The Naked Eye”) is a brilliant piece of choreographic flow, sensibility and Imagination, creating a special place of sight, sound, emotion, sense and personal meaning.  

L’Oeil nu is a case study in how space is shaped into place through set and how that shaping determines how performance (i.e., performers with spectators) will generate sense. I discussed this topic in an earlier post on Aurélien Dougé’s Aux Lointains, Magic movements, body and space. Like L’Oeil nu, Aux Lointains was a feature of Swiss Dance Week, which took place from 21 to 28 November 2024.

L’Oeil nu set is a fairly narrow rectangle with the entry on one end, where I’ve come in, a long open space between spectator chairs set in five rows on each of its two long sides and, on the far end, a reel-to-reel tape recorder in front of an open wall. The set is narrow enough to ensure that no spectator can get a vision of the whole. Performers are already there, spread along, rather than formed into, a performance center, always in some way nearer or farther from some spectators. It seems they are playing at the supremely ordinary picnic game of bowls.

 

“L’Oeil-nu” by Maud-Blandel. Photo © Pascal Gély

I’m a bit late coming in. I am hurrying along, sensitivity a bit heightened. In contrast to the spectator nearest the door and partially in common with 99% of the others, in order to find my place as a partial observer, I have to walk along the set as more or less “observable, observed, observing” by spectators and performers alike. The thirty seconds or less realtime involved here is three minutes felt time.

Rather than complement a performance that is essentially posture and interaction as at an elegant picnic – players playing: solo/solos/Individual/individuals, duo/duos/couple/couples, trio/trios/triangulars, small groups – light, sound and sense intrude into L’Oeil nu as agents of chaos or order rather than chaotic or orderly elements. Lighting is more like moon or star or sun light, stolidly there because it is there. The reel-to-reel recorder plays an audio loop of the zany, noisy, pointless aggressiveness of the old Looney Tunes cartoon characters, Elmer Fudd, Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny. The loop thrashes in the air, builds and builds and rebuilds on itself, uncovering and evolving its possibilities, is an event within the performance happening.  

T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men is projected in bilingual edition text, nearer me, on the farther wall. Since a spectator must turn their head far left just to see a bilingual format and un-focus from the performance to make some sense of what it says, identification and sense are made in follow-up mode: Aha! Multifoliate rose ... We grope together/Between the desire And the spasm… The Hollow Man! Men. Hollow Men. This is the way the world ends. That must be it. Mistah Kurtz-he dead/A penny for the Old Guy”/ / Remember us-if at all-not as lost/In death's dream kingdomThis is cactus land/As the perpetual star.

 

“L’Oeil-nu” by Maud-Blandel. Photo © Margaux Vendassi_Camille-D_Tonnerre

And all this, as best as I can describe it, I think shows just exactly the sensibility that Maud Blandel intended, associating the experience of the death of her father with “astrophysical phenomena…”, with “rotation, gravity and periodicity [and entropy]”. In the experience of L’Oeil nu, I do possess the experience of that death or death like it in the place where her piece takes me.  There, I feel its entire relativity, its inexpressible inevitability, normality, theanchorless happening – of a star, a person, a group – that seems always suddenly to collapse into its own significance(s), to become a hole dragging the dark and the light into it.

Before seeing L’Oeil nu, I had been listening to the New Yorker writer Derek Thompson and practitioner and academic Adam Mastroianni discuss the replication crisis in experimental psychology. After Blandel’s piece, brooding in understanding beyond words, I conclude once again that the ineffable gossamer of human experience for the time being makes scientifically valid experimental psychology mostly impossible.  Even if only because it’s impossible to cheat on it, we are all better off with dance performance than experimental psychology.

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I saw Maud Blandel’s “L’Oeil nu” 28 November at Theatre public de Montreuil, sponsored by Swiss Dance Week 2024, directed by Maud Blandel and performed by Bilal El Had, Karine Dahouindji, Maya Masse, Tilouna Morel, Oscar M. Damianaki, Romane Peytavin, sound by Flavio Virzì, Denis Rollet and Maud Blandel, lighting by
Daniel Demont and Florian Bach.  “L’Oeil nu” performance was a feature of Swiss Dance Week Paris, 2024, and included dance performance by Ruth Childs, Tabea Martin, Tiran Willemse and Nina Berclaz, as well as by Aurélien Dougé and Maud Blandel from 21 - 28 November 2024.

Defining cultural times: big booms, social movements and individual experience [By Tracy Danison]

“That Is No Longer Our Smoke Sign” (1950s) by Justino Herrera. Photo © Smithsonian American Art Museum

One of the unique things about the experience of people born after 1935 is the frequent cognitive dissonance induced by living long enough to have experienced the “eras” and “ages” of contemporary (potted) history.

Take the “Civil Rights Era 1950-1963”.

Born in 1955, I do remember the shock of running into a segregated water fountain in South Carolina and buying some candy in a “Negro” grocery in Georgia (and, notably, getting warned off afterwards, by a white man). I witnessed then, have witnessed since, witness now a lot of racism, legislated and cultural, have benefited a lot from legislation made to remedy it. But I can’t for the life of me locate a “Civil Rights Era”.

That’s because if “history” is something that has happened, which events, effects and outcomes are known and accounted for, then I’m living, along with others born on the tail-end of the Baby Boom, the struggle for race equality right now. Maybe the “Civil Rights Era” references a time period when elites were obliged to notice; Jim Crow may be down by law but not, by any means, out. The South is still solid, too.

“Uranium and Atomica Melancholica Idyll” (1945) by Salvador Dali. Photo © Fundació Gala-Salvador Dali

Again, born in 1955 and placed in a Catholic elementary school in Wadsworth, Ohio, I learned early to squat correctly under a school desk in the event of atomic attack. Also, I remember, am still today touched by, the scene from the Time Machine where the elderly Filby (Alan Young) urges George (Rod Taylor) to get to the shelter, atomic satellites, you see. I reckon, then, as well as the Civil Right Era, I’ve been living, have lived, am living the “Atomic Age”.

But “Atomic Age” doesn’t name the time I’ve experienced, nor the outlook I’ve developed or, for that matter, those of my fellow humans. “Atomic” is not the right adjective, “Age” not the right noun.

Uranium (Pink), Urangestein (Rosa),1992. Photo, Sigmar Polke © The Estate of Sigmar Polke 

“Atomic” puts aside the awful realization that “the bomber will always get through” as well as the actual experience and effects of the non-atomic firestorms at Dresden and elsewhere, the flattening of Warsaw, the flattening of Stalingrad, the flattening of Germany and then of Viet Nam, then of Afghanistan, now of Ukraine. If “Atomic Age” names the politics and social psychology involved in threats of indiscriminate mass killing with ecocide, why so? With a single exception none of the experienced horror has involved atomic booms.

Since 2022, for instance, not a week has gone by without Vladimir Putin, a fascist strongman who runs a now capitalist, neo-colonial Russia, threatening atomic war. It is said, and I believe it, the United States promises a non-atomic response more than adequate to such occasion. As previously, both sides hesitate. That all seems to me to be about getting in the best boom, not the atomic-est one.

“Bomb, Canopic Jar, Victims” (1967) by Nancy Spero © Nancy Spero

Instead of “Atomic Age”, why not “Best Boom Age” or “Age of Boom”, then? Because the absurdity of “Age of Boom” points, at least for poets and lovers of irony, the absurdity of using “Atomic Age” to name humanity’s urgent struggle to get a grip on its relationships with each other and the rest of nature.

So, cognitive dissonance was my first reaction to the exhibition Les artistes à l’épreuve de l’histoire - l’Age atomique(“Artists confronting history – the Atomic Age”), which recently opened at the Musée de l’art moderne de Paris. The curators say that the invention of the atomic bomb and its use marked a turning point in the modern history of the atom, starting a “new”, second Atomic Age. Since that big boom at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, art, science and politics have become indissociable.

“Dub”: Amala Dianor’s sparkling and energetic hip hop fusion ballet consecrated in Paris [By Tracy Danison]

“Dub” by Amala-Dianor, Palais-des-Festivals, Cannes. Photo © Pierre Gondard

Amala Dianor’s sparkling and energetic hip hop fusion ballet, Dub, is a performance not to be missed – get a taste by clicking on the link for a whole performance at the Maison de la Culture de Grenoble, televised last February by Arte, the France-Germany culture/society media channel.

As a performance Dub is not only entertaining, intriguing and stimulating, it’s also at the Théâtre de la Ville- Sarah Bernhardt, which has featured, still does feature, contemporary dance with global cultural resonance. It is staged there at a time of real change in outlook and management in this country and around the globe. And considering its progress through province in 2024, I think it’s safe to say, it’s consecration as much as anything.

And, it may just be the fin de siècle feeling sloshing around in me as I sit one among the cool thousand there for the Paris première, but Dub does seem to me to mark a genuine, no-turning-back cultural change of gears – it’s forward, not retrograde movement.

Here is bare sketch of how the performance is conceived and rolled out. First off, the choreographic challenge, the choreographer’s notes say, is to bring together experts in such hip hop styles and variants as waacking, dancehall, electro, pantsula, new style or krump. The title “Dub”, in addition to implying a transformation of one language into another, say the notes, conjures the real-time in situ remixing of the soundtrack associated with reggae music. Set décor is inspired by the spontaneously developed performance spaces of young, social media dance performance entrepreneurs. The show’s performers, hailing from the US, South Africa, and France, indeed, have global careers and crews (troupes) of their own.

 

“Dub” by Amala-Dianor, Palais-des-Festivals, Cannes. Photo © Pierre Gondard

What I see from my seat is a dee-jay/sound-maker – that would be either Grégoire Korganow or Awir Leon – left-centered among symmetrical and stacked frames and color-light props. The set strikes me as a full-circle play off the 60s TV dance show Hollywood A Go Go, in which the tech and set try to evoke the crowded immediacy of live performance. In Dub, the set focuses individual energies and discrete movement that might otherwise get lost in immediacy of a crowd. Inside the set, a first dance performer, a man, does a very aerial (hands and torso) take on what says to me, who have a tatty cliché of Indian dance in my head, “Bharatanatyam”. This folds into an hour or so of learning, borrowing, imitating, integrating and fusing in a kaleidoscoping of solo, couple and group encounter or “battles”. Each performer and contributor, dee-jay and set designer, too, visually “pass through” roles as the performance rolls forward. If the piece means to take us along with these amazing bodies and entrancing sounds, the end-goal of the piece, I understand, is my sense of the sum of the performed encounters.

And from this Spartan blueprint, over my free cocktail and petit fours, I get that, first off, Dub is a culmination of a process I earlier called a geopoetic culture of the universal citizen: local, even “individual”, culture is a subset of the structuring global culture.

Just above, I called the piece “a sparkling and energetic hip hop fusion ballet”: “Hip hop” because it articulates around breaking and battle. Dub is “fusion” because it includes not just traditional and contemporary dance styles but also subculture tropes. Most striking and encouraging for me, though, is the TV-influenced technology/scenography/esthetics that spotlight live performance rather than “enhance” and distract from its anfractuosities and fissures. Dub is “sparkling” because Amala Dianor, an individual, makes it so. The fundamental sense of hip hop is in individuation (highlighting the unique identity, rather than the competitive advantages, of the performer).

 

“Dub” by Amala-Dianor, Palais-des-Festivals, Cannes. Photo © Pierre Gondard

Finally, Dub is “ballet” because it is rooted in hip hop. Indeed, hip hop is now the reference form that ballet, “an artistic dance form done to music dating back to the Renaissance”. This is a significant change because it signals, I believe, adoption of new social beliefs.

Let’s put it this way. I believe – but given that I never have had the knack of noting the structuring moments of my life, how can I possibly know?  – that the very first dance performance I ever saw was The Firebird ballet. Though I’ve always inclined toward the spiritual and the free, the modern and the contemporary in dance, my sense of what those forms of dance are has referenced the Firebird.

Thinking on my experience of Dub, going forward, I think I’ve changed in or want to change in Firebird for “a dance form that highlights individual movement originating in the African-heritage community of the United States”.  Hip hop fits the ballet bill. It is nothing if not a (highly-coded) form, and if it’s not necessarily to music, hip hop always uses sound to get a body to where it’s going; nobody believes in history as points on a time line like the Renaissance or the Atomic Age anymore – hip hop is about process in space-time and so are we all now, I think; until further notice, how is why.   

There’s a lot to be said about getting on board with hip hop – its underlying philosophy of equality and solidarity and its energy liberates. But if it puts aside achievement for individuation, it also lacks tragedy, sympathy for the devil. I reckon that’s a reflection of hip hops origins in the puritan USA, where there’s no tragedy, only failure. Getting it wrong is a vaguely absurd zero-sum pantomime: You idiot, Lear, ya done kilt ‘er! Now those awful bitches are in charge!

I’ll hope for the best, see what happens. Hip hop is, as I say, about process.

________

I saw “Dub”, dance performance choreographed by Amala Dianor on Wednesday, 11 December 2024, at Théâtre de la Ville- Sarah Bernhardt, Paris,  with set and sound design by, respectively, Grégoire Korganow and Awir Leon and performed by Slate Hemedi Dindangila, Romain Franco, Jordan John Hope, Enock Kalubi Kadima, Mwendwa Marchand, Kgotsofalang Joseph Mavundla, Sangram Mukhopadhyay, Tatiana Gueria Nade, Yanis Ramet, Germain Zambi and Asia Zonta 

Dub in France & Europe, Spring & Summer 2025

• Le Corum, Montpellier Danse, France - 7 February 2025
• Le Forum, Fréjus, France - 11, 12 February 2025
• Grand Théâtre du Luxembourg, LUX - 28 February 2025
• Équinoxe, Scène nationale de Châteauroux - 4 March 2025
• L’Onde, Vélizy, France - 7 March 2025
• Le Bateau feu, Dunkerque /Le Grand Bain - 11, 12 March 2025
• Opéra de Limoges tournée LEVEL UP (extrait de DUB) 14, 15 March 2025
• Théâtre du Nord, CDN, Lille /Le Grand Bain - 18, 19 March 2025
• Théâtre Sénart, scène nationale - 30 May 2025  
• One Dance Week, Plovdiv, Bulgaria - 4, 5 June 2025
• Espace 1789, Saint Ouen, France - 29 May 2025
• One dance week, Plovdiv, Bulgaria - 27, 28 June 2025
• Festival COLOURS, Stuttgart, Germany - 7,8 July 2025
• Grand Palais, Paris - 10 July 2025
• ImPulsTanz festival, Vienna, Austria. Dates to be determined